It used to be that a polished old K was as bad as a rewrapped drum
[COLOR="DarkRed"]Neither are evil....[/COLOR]
And yes, I am the head of an evil underground power mongering cymbal collective conspiracy to dominate the used cymbal market....
[COLOR="Green"]Well....how many underground cymbal cabals are there then ? Because yours must make number ten (unless we are in the same one and we just don't know it).
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[COLOR="DarkRed"]But seriously....I would tend to agree that for old K's...no, it doesn't matter anymore whether they have been cleaned or not. The ONLY thing I can think of there would be if the cleaning took off the signature....THEN, maybe, there'd be a very mild price drop.
I think that with pretty much any other cymbal, it really isn't gonna have an effect on price.
I have had potential buyers try that line on me in the instances where the cymbal I was selling had had some of its patina removed. And I just won't bite on that. The retort is quite simple: "keep it around for a while, and it'll develop the patina again".
(Now when we say polishing and cleaning...we are talking about actually removing patina...not just using soap and water to clean off grime and fingerprints and stickmarks and such. Because you CAN clean a cymbal and leave the patina).
The thing about patina is....it is not just a process of the cymbal surface being 'dirty'. It's not like the 'original' cymbal is trapped under this 'crust' of patina and grime and therefore the 'real' sound has been trapped inside.
Drumaholic can explain this better than I...but patina and age actually causes changes at the molecular (or is it atomic ?) level of the metal. So, even if you take the patina off of a 30-year old cymbal...it's still not gonna sound like it did when it was brand-new....because the bronze is not brand-new anymore.
With that said...yes, to a certain extent cleaning the patina off can oftentimes make a cymbal sound 'brighter' and wider in overtones. I agree that there is a general misconception that it is a no-no to clean vintage cymbals. But that has to be asterisked* with:
If you LIKE the way it sounds NOW, don't remove the patina.
If you wanna see if you can 'open' up the sound a bit, you can try removing some or all of the patina.
HOWEVER, this might NOT end up achieving the desired effect, in the end.
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